Farting Puppets: The Terrific, Bizarre World of Danish Kids' TV

A little more than two years ago,
Denmark’s absurdly well-funded public-television network DR spun
off some of its children’s programming and launched a separate
station just for kids. The new station was named “Ramasjang,” which
means something like “hullabaloo” in Danish, and it’s amazing. I
can’t get enough.

Ramasjang has everything you’d want in a children’s television
network. It’s got a fake news program called “Gepetto
News,” starring a talking purse named Babe and a whole cast of
puppets that look like drug-addled Jim Henson bizarros. It’s got
earnest
dance lessons meant for preteens that somehow don’t make you
cringe while you’re watching them. It’s got a show called “Nørd”
(nerd), about the science of sports like tennis, archery and
cycling. These alone would keep me hooked to the online archives—and
I don’t even speak Danish. But I haven’t even gotten to the
strangely hypnotic video loops of the sleeping, farting puppets, or
the political dust-up over the network’s elderly transvestite
character.

Ramasjang’s programming is educational, but not exclusively.
It’s often just really, really weird. Fans of “Sesame Street” and
its yep-yep-nope-nope Martians will
appreciate the absurdity of this next clip. What seems at first to
be a Flaming Lips video from the early nineties turns out to be
Ramasjang’s hit music video “Mr.Calzone,” starring a hideous,
singing pizza.

It’s also wholesome as heck. One of my favorite programs is “Min
Funky Familie,” a School of Rock-type conceit where kids and
their families get rock n’ roll makeovers and perform a song at the
end. The kids are the lead singers, and the parents and older
siblings back them up on drums, bass and guitar. And the songs are
often in English—from ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” to AC/DC’s “It’s a Long
Way to the Top”—so it’s extra entertaining. “My Funky Family” pulls
on a precise combination of my heartstrings by mashing up
kid-comeback, glamorous-makeover and the earnest faces of the
parents who are doing this thing to support their kids even though
they look pretty silly in the process. (Go to the DR website
here for an archive of show clips.)

What the cast of Ramasjang lacks in ethnic diversity (about
90 percent of people living in Denmark today are of Danish
descent), it makes up for in spunk and cheeriness. Here’s a TV spot
for a show called “Victorious.” I don’t know what this one is
about, but I do love a tiny blond hip-hopping child—always have,
always will!

The DR website describes Ramasjang as “the channel that parents
can safely dare send their children alone in the room to
see—without having to be nervous if they see something that’s too
creepy.” That (bizarre thing) being said, Ramasjang isn’t overly
prudish or protective, either. The producers of the network aren’t
afraid to stand up against criticism from conservative politicians;
our own PBS should take note.

Last month, the Christian Democrat party in Denmark—which, true,
is so far to the right that it has no representatives in Parliament
at the moment—filed a
complaint with DR about a segment of “Gepetto News” that its
members found especially offensive. The show featured an old man
(puppet) wearing women’s underwear. He comes home from work, takes
off his clothes, and dances in front of a mirror while singing a
song whose chorus roughly translates to “I feel most free when I
wear French lingerie.” The group, which was outraged that a
children’s program was being used for what was termed “propaganda,”
argued that it was exposing children to confusing issues before
they would be prepared to process them correctly.

DR rejected the criticism with a shrug. Channel editor Kirstine
Vinderskov responded by saying that it was Ramasjang’s job to
“celebrate the values of diversity and tolerance.” (The
Transvestite Association of Denmark (TID) also weighed in; the group’s
president Pernille Feline explained that the
segment in question isn’t about sex, it’s about gender roles, which
is a perfectly appropriate thing for children to explore. She
dismissed the debate by saying “It is a fart in a horn lantern.”
(Goofy translations courtesy of Google Chrome.)

Although I’ve since become a connoisseur of Ramasjang, my first
introduction to it was accidental. I was flipping channels one
night in a Copenhagen hotel room last fall, Carlsberg and
stroopwafels in hand—and hoping for a rerun of “M*A*S*H,” as I’d
enjoyed in many other Scandinavian spots along my trip. I landed on
a program that baffled me. It wasn’t a show, because nothing
happened, and it wasn’t a commercial, because it wouldn’t end. It
was a series of shots of people and puppets sleeping, in a dimly
lit room, with a grandfather clock tick-tocking soothingly in the
background. All of the sleepers made comically loud sleep
sounds—rolling around in bed, talking through their dreams, and,
well, farting. Here’s a clip:

A few days later I happened to be interviewing two DR news
reporters for another story, and so I asked them what in the world
was up with the sleeping, farting puppets and humans. Sabine Matz
and Michael Bech explained that the sleeping figures were all hosts
of the shows that played on the network throughout the day. Instead
of the network going black at night, it plays this sleep-themed
loop, and there’s a countdown on the top of the screen, saying, for
instance, “DR Ramasjang vi vågner om 10 timer og 5 minutter” (“DR
Ramasjang will wake in 10 hours and 5 minutes”). The loop plays
from 8:30 at night until 6 in the morning, when regular programming
resumes.

“So the children know these guys, the puppets and the people,”
said Michael. “The one thing is, it’s saving money for the channel,
and it’s also so that the parents can tell their children, ‘See,
you have to go to bed now; all the others are sleeping.'” Sabine
told me that her five-year-old loved the network, and that it had
won many awards in Denmark.

I told them that in the U.S., no channels tend to go black at
night—not anymore, at least—and that when they run out of original
programming in the odd hours, they just play reruns or
infomercials. Then Michael said the most obvious thing in the
world. “Children shouldn’t be watching television in the middle of
the night,” he said. “We are supposed to say, don’t switch it
on—when it’s bedtime, it is not TV time.”

That’s what I love most about Ramasjang, and why I think it so
perfectly captures a particularly Scandinavian ethos—socially
liberal, but simultaneously strict on matters of public health and
well-being. It’s public television that isn’t afraid to be really
weird, and it doesn’t buckle to hysterics from hyper-conservatives.
Yet at the end of the day, it takes the somewhat radical step of
telling its audience to turn it off.

Lauren Kirchner is
a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn who has lately learned to
love pickled herring.